Grieg: Lyric Pieces X, Op. 71: VII. Remembrances

This morning I listened to some more of Grieg's Lyric Pieces for piano.  The seventh piece (Remembrances) in Book X, Op. 71 sounded a bit familiar, and I realized that it's very similar to the first piece (Arietta) in Book I, Op. 12.

I intended to look up the notation for both and compare them, but when I lookt up the notation for Op. 71: VII, I noticed an asterisk after the title:

which lead to a footnote at the bottom of the page:

It's in German:  "Vergl[eich] Lyrische Stücke Heft 1 No. 1 (Arietta)."  Translated, this is "Compare Lyric Pieces Book 1 No. 1 (Arietta)."

I'm glad that footnote was there because the notation is still above my skill level.  I did notice though that Arietta and Remembrances are both in the same key: Eb major.

Most of the books of Grieg's Lyric Pieces that I have are incomplete; I have only excerpts.  This is the case with Book X.  I lookt up the complete book and discovered that Remembrances is the last piece in the book.  Since Book X is also the last book of Grieg's Lyric Pieces, there's a sort of bookending going on.  He starts and ends his Lyric Pieces with a similar-sounding tune.

Rod Argent's Classically Speaking

This morning I listened to some excerpts of Grieg's lyric pieces for piano.  I'm most familiar with the first piece of the first book (Op. 12: I. Arietta) via Rod Argent's recording on Classically Speaking.  Although this was an album entirely of Grieg pieces, after the Arietta, I expected to hear Chopin's Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12 because that's the second track on Argent's Classically Speaking.  I started wondering about the transition between the two pieces and thought there was something more to the relationship between them than just my familiarity with that particular sequencing.

I lookt up the notation for Grieg's Arietta and discovered that it's in Eb major.  As the title of the Chopin piece would suggest, it's in C minor.  C minor and Eb major are relative keys.  Their scales contain all the same notes; they just start in different places.  My expecting the Chopin piece after the Grieg piece revealed a clever bit of sequencing on Argent's part.  There's a relatively smooth transition between the two pieces because they have similar tonalities.